Seyun shifted his right hand on the side of Bed Two.
Instead of keeping both fingers bunched together on the bronze metal ring, he left his right index finger resting squarely on the metal lip of the fifth-rib socket while stretching his right thumb and middle finger three inches lower along Pera’s side, tracing the crooked slanted beneath her eleventh floating rib where Mina’s hand waited. At the same time, he brought his bandaged left palm up from the iron bedframe to brace his right forearm against the tremor of the floor.
“Wait for the foot,” Mina said quietly, her eyes moving between Pera’s exposed left ankle and the red-soaked linen on her brother’s hands. “The pipe hub wave is passing now. Three, four... There. The ankle is warming.”
Beneath the wool blanket, the blue vein on Pera’s left instep flushed warm.
Two heartbeats ahead of the machine, Pera inhaled. Not pulling upward toward the bronze plug in her chest, but dropping the breath down into her left hip and swinging it wide toward the eleventh floating rib.
Inside Seyun’s chest, Place II beneath his right collarbone rang with the full, unbending weight of Daro Kesh’s Deeper Bronze echo. This time, Seyun didn’t brace his channels against the echo, nor did he try to compress it into a single even line. He remembered the rain-slicked mud of the black-roof schoolyard and the crookedpike scar under Pera’s ribs. He let the Returning Step inside his right arm divide at the elbow.
